Sacrifice
by AnnieSometimes
Summary: The story of Ursa's banishment - what really happened? Did she ever see Zuko again? One-Shot. R&R please.


A/N: One of the many One-Shots I have written and laying about ^^ This one has been floating around for awhile, in my head, on paper, and now finally online. I'm not sure if I want to make a sequel or not - let me know. Enjoy and comment please! :]

She was banished. _Banished!_ She couldn't believe that he would do this to her, _his wife_! The mother of his children! After what she had done for him...after what she had sacrificed. She was still dumbstruck, but she knew she had to leave. There was nothing else for it. If she defied her banishment, she would not be the only one to suffer. She wouldn't let her son suffer at the hands of her own foolishness.

A tear fell from her face as she thought of him, her poor son, the apple of her eye. Looking back, loving Zuko so much may have played a large part in Ozai's decision to banish her. Azula was clearly his number one priority, other than becoming Fire Lord. It only took one glance to see that he was disgusted by the boy. It wasn't Zuko's fault that he took up so much after her, it wasn't his fault that he was a slow learner - everybody had their faults. Zuko's was hard-headed-ness. It was that shared quality between he and his son that Ozai loathed; obstinance. It wasn't _really_ that Zuko wasn't learning his bending as quickly as everybody else, it wasn't that he was mostly like her in his personality...those things just made Ozai look down upon Zuko. But it was that Ozai could see himself in Zuko, in his 'weakness', that made Ozai hate the boy.

She didn't want to leave Zuko alone in that place. But she had no choice - she'd done what she could to save him! At least he was alive this way. At least he was saved. It turned out Azulon was as ruthless as his son; what a disgusting man, to order the death of Ozai's own son to compensate for asking for the throne. She'd done what any mother would have done. She killed Azulon. He was old. He hadn't been expecting it. She had to do it.

Ozai was angry because she had killed Azulon for Zuko's sake, and not his own. She had not murdered a man so he could become Fire Lord...she had murdered to save his son. She shook her head, and looked out of the window.

She was in an Ostrich-Horse-drawn carriage with precious few belongings, on its way to the shores of the Fire-Nation. There she would board a ship, which would take her to the Earth Kingdom. She laughed bitterly to herself, knowing that Ozai gave her transportation only so that it would appear that he had feelings for her, that he loved her at all, that _she_ was the bad one. If he had no reputation to uphold, if he weren't trying to convey to the Fire-Nation citizens that he was fit to be their ruler, he would have personally dragged her by her hair, and thrown her into the ocean himself.

Where had her love gotten her? She had loved Ozai once, though it was unclear if he had ever really felt the same way. But after Zuko was born, after his third year and he had proved that he was more-than-likely not going to be a prodigy, Ozai had shunned him. She had not. It created a rift. A rift that just grew bigger and bigger in their relationship until it could be likened to the Great Divide. Her head fell into her hands.

If she had seen herself here four years ago, would she have still chosen her son over her husband? Would she have still chosen this?

Yes. She would never give up on her son. Never.

She straightened up. What was done was done. No use crying over cold Fire-flakes. She had sacrificed herself for Zuko, and she would do it again and again a hundred times if she had to, if she could; she just wished that she could be there to see him grow - to protect him from his father. What a morally disgusting man - if you could call him a man at all. She looked out of her window, and saw the shore in the distance - the horizon half sea foam green, half azure blue, with just a touch of the setting sun in the background. She watched as the shore got closer and closer, and then she saw her ship. It was modest - by no means a navy fleet ship like the one she'd seen once, taking a tour with Ozai.

The carriage came to a gentle stop. She opened the door, and stepped lithely out onto the half-sand half-grass ground. She looked at her driver - a beloved servant from the palace, Piazzo, and grabbed a large bag that she could haul onto her shoulder; Piazzo came and picked up the remaining two bags, and they began the slow procession to the ship.

She thought it was ridiculous that she apparently needed to be escorted onto the ship by no less than fifty guards - she wasn't even a bender. She had no combat skills of any type - her mother had never allowed such things. She understood why it was vital for the Fire Prince and Princess to learn Fire-Bending, but she never knew why Azula's friends', Ty Lee and Mai's mothers let them dabble in such things as knife-throwing and Kyusho Jitsu and such. How little sense it all made! At least the guards treated her with respect, nodding their heads as she passed them. Were she still a Queen in power, they would be on their hands and knees - but she was not. The Fire Nation would probably be told that she had been unfaithful to Ozai, or she had beaten Azula - some crime within the family. It wouldn't be said that she was the murderer she was. The Royal Family was to be portrayed as sinless. It obviously wasn't that way - and sometimes it was hard to cover things up. She would not be a murderer because it would cast the eye on Zuko, more Azula and raise a simple question - what if they inherited the 'murder' gene? No, she would be a cheater, or a liar. Some smaller sin - but a sin nonetheless. She had to be banished for something.

She boarded the ship, and to her surprise, Piazzo didn't leave. She stood on the deck, looking at the carriage now being manned by some stranger. She took one last look at the Fire Nation, her home, and sighed sadly. She would never see this again, unless by some fluke chance Ozai were defeated. But she knew that that was impossible - nobody alive would dare challenge, or could challenge, the King of the Fire Nation.

She watched her carriage being taken back to the palace. Tears fell swiftly down her face as she thought about the fate of that carriage - it would be placed among the others. Nobody would know that it carried the disgraced Queen Ursa to her life of banishment. It would be unidentifiable as the carriage that was burdened by her regrets and suffering. It would be used again and again - it would be taken to the market, it would be taken on vacation...it might even be the carriage that carries Zuko to his first date, his first real War Meeting, his wedding...

And then she let the tears go. She cried uncontrollably onto Piazzo's shoulder, who patted her awkwardly on the back. She was so depressed that she was leaving! She didn't _want_ to leave! She hated Ozai, her love for him, and that giant rift between them, she hated the palace and its guards and its _Spirits-awful_ sparse decor, she hated the war they were waging, she hated Sozin for his remarkable stupidity and ruthlessness - and now that she could be free to admit it, red was a horrid color! She'd abhorred it for most of her life! Green was a safer bet anyway. The only remotely Fire Nation thing that she did not hate were her children. Even if Azula was too much Ozai for her comfort, she still loved Azula as much as Zuko. But there was more of a connection with her son. He loved her more. He was with her more.

By the time she had stopped crying, the ship was already half-way out of the bay. It had taken, according to Piazzo, awhile to get the ship out of the port and into sail-able water. She'd been sobbing for quite some time. He handed her a glass of water and bade her to drink. She took a sip, and took one last look at the palace before it faded into the horizon, just another blob in the murky clouds. Her heart ached. But what was done was done; she'd played her part. She turned resolutely on the Fire Nation, ready to begin her life elsewhere, and to try to follow her son's every move.

Ursa wiped her brow in frustration. It was too hot. It was always too hot. Having lived in the Fire Nation, she hadn't thought it would get any hotter than that, but this...this was dry heat. This was unbearable. She tried to get her mind off of the heat, and looked around her shop in satisfaction. The women always flocked to her small boutique - it was quite worth the work she went through. Earth Kingdom women loved her designs, seeing them as things like 'cutting-edge', and 'chic'. Though she loved the compliments, she wasn't quite sure she deserved the credit. After all, she was only merging Fire Nation fashion with Earth-Kingdom fashion. Nothing to be riled up about, really. But for the past few years, she'd done well in her banishment; her ex-brother-in-law would be disappointed that she saw the inside of Ba Sing Se before he did; but what really did that matter? She wasn't Fire Nation anymore, and according to her new neighbors, she never had been. Her story was that her children and husband died in a raid; this proved helpful in the fact that her neighbors were sympathetic. Everybody had lost something, somebody, but almost _nobody_ had lost everything; not like she had, anyway. The story was close enough to the truth, so she didn't feel bad about telling it; she certainly felt sometimes that Zuko and Azula _were_ dead; but she had to keep it in her head that the servants would take care of Zuko; she had asked them personally to do so before she left. Quite a few nodded adamantly, knowing Ozai and his unusual cruelty. Others had blushed and looked away, and she worried about this; what if the wrong person was around when something went wrong?

She knew she should be saying 'if something went wrong', but she wasn't stupid. Ozai didn't view Zuko as his son, and wouldn't until Zuko did something mighty for his country, or at least proved himself equal to Azula. Which was unlikely at best, she hated to admit. But she kept her eyes peeled, looking for any news of the royal family. Her family. Occasionally there would be a shopper who came from outside of the wall that heard news, but never really of the royal family - there was no reason for refugees to know of the Fire Lord's familial squabbles. This just wasn't enough for her. She simply had to know more. Four years into banishment, she tried to leave Ba Sing Se.

This would prove to be one of the dumbest things she'd done in her life, other than assuming that Ozai would protect her. She hadn't made it past the first wall when, out of nowhere, she was pinned to the ground with what seemed like hands, but there was no weight behind them, and they felt like stone. And out of the darkness there was an oily voice.

"Ah, if it's not the Queen of the Fire Nation"

She later learned that when the man spoke, she listened. If he asked a question, it had better get answered. If he said jump, you didn't ask 'how high?', you should have already known. Her prison was dark, dank, moist, grimy, and silent. There were no locks on her prison door, nor any prison door. They were not needed. She didn't have the nerve to walk out there and face the Dai Li. Nobody did. She discovered, on what could have been her third day here - there was no way of telling any increment of time here, there were no windows, and no light sources that she could see - that she wasn't a prisoner of the Earth King, as she had presumed, but something else entirely. There were other women here. Some deeply afraid, like herself, others completely content. She never saw the happy ones for more than a few days at a time - they would disappear. She tried acting like they did, but to no visible success. She hoped that this wasn't some underground slave trade, or worse, a sex trade. She'd heard of something like this before, but had only listened in with an innate sense of horror. She hadn't imagined that the women involved were innocent in any way to begin with. They were already whores and worthless women, offering themselves up for a higher sale-price. She had no idea that they were _real _women. Just innocent women. It horrified her - she'd done nothing wrong! She didn't want to be sold.

But Spirits knew how long later, she began to expect that there was something else going on here. The guards would come in, drill her for information, and leave when she had told them everything she knew. They did not hit her if they could help it, for which she was grateful. They just asked her about the Fire Nation - war plans, training, _endless_ questions on how they manipulated metal and things of that nature. They were very frustrated when she proved to not know anything; women weren't generally allowed into things like that; Azula got away with it because she was Ozai's favorite. They started coming less and less, until she felt that a week might have gone by completely by herself. Or, at least, twenty-one meals had passed. She thought. And then it all changed.

As it turned out, information may have been her saving-grace. If only she'd paid more attention to the War-Meetings, had invested herself in the invasions and generals and things of that nature...if she knew more, the man said he would have granted her anything she wanted. He might have even been able to finagle her son and perhaps even her daughter if only she'd proved more useful in the destruction of the Fire Nation. For if she'd had more information, Ba Sing Se would have been able to strike back, and perhaps win the war. Then Zuko and Azula wouldn't have needed to have suffered!

But she hadn't. She hadn't invested herself in those things. She had never given it a passing thought. How foolish. She wept bitter tears, knowing now that this man, this _Long Feng_, could have given her what she wanted. But then, he continued on that she could still be of use to him. The last thing she heard him say was, 'The Earth King has invited you to Lake Laogai"

The Earth King _must_ be served. If she could serve him being a tour guide, a tour guide she would be. The tourists were generally wary of her skin tone, but she would explain how her mother had been part albino, and she had inherited the pale skin. How silly of them, to think she was from the Fire Nation. Sillier still was the fear the Nation invoked upon them. The Fire Nation was a peaceful place, full of happy children and spicy food. So she'd heard from...somewhere. She couldn't quite recall. She'd show the people around, situate them, and slowly strip them of their ridiculous notions that there was some kind of war going on. There was a lot of people around who were sadly misinformed. Didn't they know that the Air Nomads died out from disease? Airphoma, or something. She'd heard that from...somewhere. She couldn't quite recall. She went about this for...some time. She didn't really know how long - she guessed the years just blended into one another easily. She went, day by day, showing people around. When there were no new visitors for her to take care of, which was rare, she showed off museums to children, or went on luxurious vacations to Lake Laogai, on invitation from the Earth King - he really was so kind to his subjects.

Time passed in a blur. It always had, from her memory. Her life was mostly just a haze of faces and lines from directory guides, but this moment shone for her. She remembered it, because she was _real_ in this moment. The Dai Li couldn't erase it, because they didn't know it was there. But she had a moment that she _knew _was real. For the most part, it was a dream. Right after her monthly hypnotizations, she couldn't remember it at all, but a week or so after, it would come back in a dream. Then she'd think over it and over it. But the end of each month, she was almost entirely lucid - that was, until she went in again.

She remembered it like it was yesterday.

She had just been greeting some new people, around the end of the month. She was surprisingly lucid on this particular day, and somehow had the vague feeling that these people were...below her status, and that she shouldn't be showing them around Ba Sing Se, of all the most ridiculous places. She knew almost nothing about Ba Sing Se. She was helping them into the carriage, stating her name, which felt weird on her tongue.

"Hello! Welcome to Ba Sing Se! You must be Xin Fu and Master Yu, it's so nice to have you here. My name Is Joo Dee, and I'll be assisting you - "

And that's when she saw him. She saw her son. Her heart almost dropped, though her jaw certainly did. Suddenly, she remembered that she wasn't Joo Dee. Who was she? Oh, that didn't matter! She just saw her son! She saw _Zuko_! Her heart sped with delight. She snapped the carriage doors closed, and slapped the Ostrich-Horse to its flank to set it running. She intently followed her son, and her brother-in-law. She watched fondly as her brother-in-law, Iris? Ire? Iroh, ah! Yes. Iroh, purchased a vase of flowers, and showed it to her boy. He disapproved, from what she could see of his head-shake. That was so like him - he never did like girly things. Then, he turned his head just so. And she gasped as tears fell down her face. She started to run towards him frantically. Zuko?!_ No!_ His _face_! Her baby's face...how scarred it was! Her heart was racing for a different reason now. She had to go to Zuko! Why was he hurt? And why on Earth was he in Ba Sing Se, when he should be - !

"The Earth King invites you to Lake Laogai" came a voice from a shadow.

A rock glove pulled her struggling body into the shadow, but then she gave them the words that she couldn't help but speak.

"I am honored to accept his invitation"

**I love comments**, btw. Let me know what you think ^^ I want to know who's reading.


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